Supplementary
Resubmit any failed elements and/or make good any missing elements. Where this involves failure in the essay assignment, a new topic must be selected. In the event of failure in the oral presenation element, a 15 minute written script on a new topic, written as if for delivery, with accompanying visual aids to be submitted.

100%

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this module students should typically be able to:

1. demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the set texts, and an informed awareness of their relationship to the generic traditions of comedy;

2. articulate this knowledge and awareness in the form of a reasoned critical analysis of particular texts;

3. relate the texts studied to early modern ideas about theatre and society, and to the conditions of tehatrical performance, and show how an understanding of these ideas and conditions can inform critical interpretation;

5. articulate some of their findings in the form of an oral presentation.

Aims

This module, taught to second-year students at level three, furthers their study of Renaissance comedy already begun in the first-year core module EN10420 Aspects of Genre and complements and extends the study of Renaissance theatre undertaken in the second-year core module EN20520 Medieval and Renaissance Writing. It develops students' understanding of genre and of the complex and rapidly changing theatre of the period 1595-1615, and enables them to engage with recent theoretical debates about the relationship between theatre and society. It is designed to give students a solid grounding in the study of the early modern comic theatre on which they can build, if they so choose, in more specialised final-year project/dissertation work. The original version of the module focused exclusively on plays by Shakespeare and his great contemporary Ben Jonson; the revised version of the module introduces plays by two other dramatists into the syllabus. this should make it easier to bring into focus larger issues of genre and of cultural context, and to free the module from the pedagogic and intellectual constrictions of the 'comparison between great authors' framework.

Brief description

The module offers students a chance to extend their knowledge of Shakespearean comedy and to relate their reading of the four set Shakespeare plays to four probably less familiar works by his contemporaries Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, and Francis Beaumont. Each Shakespeare play is studied in conjunction with a related play by another dramatist, the set texts being selected to build up a representative picture of the range of forms and meanings of comedy in the period 1595-1615. Important themes of the module will include: the relationship between the theatre and popular festive practice (carnival and carnivalesque); the theatre's role in mediating between courtly and popular culture; the ways in which the plays engage with the help to define contemporary urban experience; the regulation and meanings of laughter, mockery and burlesque.

Content

Programme
Teaching will be by ten two-hour seminars and will make regular use of small-group presentations.